I thought this would nicely fit the topic of accountability.

..Meaning if the government representatives can't be held accountable,
is it really a representative government anymore, but a dictatorship?

Nice to see Internet is also useful for something like this.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121204I.shtml

        Cyber-Campaign Demands Congress Censure Bush
        By Jim Lobe
        Inter-press Services

        Wednesday 11 February 2004

          WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (IPS) - Grassroots cyber-movement
    MoveOn.org, which claims more than two million U.S. members, has
    launched a major campaign demanding Congress formally censure
    President George W. Bush for lying to it about the threat posed by
    ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

        Joined by another group, Win Without War (WWW), MoveOn said it
    had already collected more than 450,000 signatures on an
    email-based petition drive in just the past week, and will now take
    out print and television advertising to bring more people into the
    movement.

        The two groups ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post on
    Tuesday that accused Bush of running "a campaign of misinformation,
    of cherry-picking and distorting intelligence, of hype and hysteria
    that led America into an unnecessary war".

        "There must be consequences when a president misleads the
    American people, and the Congress, with such disastrous results",
    said the ad, which featured a photograph of a pensive Bush with the
    caption, "He knew".

        "An independent commission can deal with failures at the
    intelligence agencies. Congress should deal with the failures at
    the White House," it added.

        "Congress devoted considerable attention and, eventually, voted
    to impeach President (Bill) Clinton for misleading the public about
    a sexual affair", said Adam Ruben, national field director of
    MoveOn.

        "It isn't unreasonable to think that misleading the nation
    about the necessity of going to war constitutes an abuse of power
    of much greater significance."

        The campaign by MoveOn and WWW, which is expected to be joined
    by other national anti-war groups in coming days, begins as the
    administration, including Bush himself, has become increasingly
    defensive about both the war and the justifications it gave for
    attacking Iraq in March.

        It also comes amid a flurry of new public-opinion polls
    indicating the president's public approval rating has fallen
    sharply over the last several weeks, particularly following the
    admission by Washington's former chief weapons inspector, David
    Kay, that the administration's pre-war statements about Iraq's
    alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programmes were
    unfounded.

        Polls over the past two weeks have shown Democratic Party
    front-runner John Kerry either ahead of or in a dead heat with the
    Republican Party's Bush if the November election were held now.

        In the latest poll, taken just after an unprecedented,
    hour-long interview with Bush on NBC-TV's 'Meet the Press' on
    Sunday, the Gallup organisation found the two candidates in a
    virtual tie. Just one month ago, Gallup had Bush leading Kerry by
    12 percentage points.

        But in a second survey taken before the interview, Gallup said
    the percentage of voters who identified themselves as Democrats had
    jumped from 30 to 34 percent in just two weeks, while those
    identifying themselves as Republicans dropped by one percentage
    point.

        As a result, Democrats now lead Republicans by three percentage
    points in party identification.

        That finding is likely to make a major impression in the
    Republican-controlled Congress, where all 435 seats of the House of
    Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for election in
    November.

        Committees in both houses have been investigating pre-war
    intelligence for months, but they have split along partisan lines
    over how to do so.

        Republicans have insisted that investigations should be
    confined to mistakes made by the official intelligence community in
    assessing the threats posed by Iraq before the war, while Democrats
    have called for the probes to be expanded to include the ways in
    which senior administration political appointees -- notably in Vice
    President Dick Cheney's office and the Pentagon -- interfered with
    that process.

        But the Democrats' appeals have been resisted by the Republican
    chairs of the two committees.

        Similarly, Bush tried to co-opt calls for a wider investigation
    last week by creating a commission to study why the intelligence
    proved wrong in Iraq, but it will not report until 2005 and its
    mandate has also been limited to the intelligence itself, rather
    than any possible manipulation by political appointees.

        The MoveOn campaign is designed to bolster demands that the
    scope of the congressional investigations be expanded as part of a
    process to formally censure Bush for distorting the intelligence.

        "This is not about a failure of intelligence", said Tom
    Andrews, a former Democratic congressman who heads WWW, which is
    itself a coalition of some 42 national groups. "It's a failure of
    integrity".

        "Bush knew that the intelligence community's assessment of
    Iraq's arms programmes did not support the administration's
    pre-conceived notion that Iraq had chemical and nuclear weapons",
    said Andrews. "He knew better -- but he chose to mislead us".

        "If Congress refuses to hold this administration accountable,
    we will hold its members accountable in every (congressional)
    district in the country", he said.

        Andrews was joined by two retired senior intelligence officials
    who charged that, while the official intelligence community made
    mistakes in their analyses, the much greater fault -- and
    distortions of intelligence -- lay with the administration's
    political figures.

        "This country is now going through the worst intelligence
    scandal in its history", said Melvin Goodman, a former top CIA
    analyst who teaches at the National Defence University here.

        Calling the administration's allegations about Hussein's
    alleged WMD programmes and ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist group a
    "campaign of deceit", he charged that the Office of Special Plans
    (OSP) established by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, "was engaged
    in falsifying intelligence information" that was then leaked to the
    press and sent via Cheney's office to the White House.

        "The reasons we were given for going to war were false", added
    Larry Johnson, a career CIA officer who served as deputy director
    of the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism in the 1990s.

        "The Bush administration engaged in a deliberate campaign of
    information warfare, which employed erroneous and misleading
    information as part of a broader strategy to build public opinion
    for an invasion", he said.

        Johnson noted that both Cheney and Rumsfeld consistently
    asserted the existence of operational ties between Iraq and
    al-Qaeda. "But the CIA found no evidence that Iraq was engaged in
    supporting Islamic terrorism", he said.

        Also on hand Tuesday was Fernando Suarez del Solar from San
    Diego, California, whose son, a Marine, was killed last March in
    Iraq. "He died in Iraq, and for what"? asked Suarez. "For President
    Bush's lies".

        MoveOn, which was founded by Internet entrepreneurs, has come
    to be seen as a model for political organising and fund-raising
    through the Internet. In the 2000 elections it raised more than two
    million dollars for congressional candidates and almost doubled
    that total in 2002.

        Consultations with its fast-growing membership earlier this
    year resulted in raising millions of dollars for Democratic
    candidate Howard Dean's now-faltering primary campaign, while its
    television and newspaper ads are widely considered among the most
    effective in the country.
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